> It takes the deep pockets of chipmakers like TSMC to push equipment makers to change equipment designs.
I presume Apple invests in a lot of the capital costs? Apple needs to put it's cash somewhere and they can align that with exclusive contractual access to production of leading edge CPUs.
Note that I haven't actually read anything about Apple's investment - I'm just hypothetically assuming it. We do sometimes hear about the exclusive contracts with TSMC.
Fabs got too expensive: that was why Global Foundries was spun out of AMD. Intel now has similar problems as AMD did?
I would phrase that as "fabs got so complex that zero-ish companies had leadership competent enough to manage both competitive fabs, and the rest of the finance / design / marketing / sales / support stack.
Even back in the mid-80's, when fabs were (relatively) dead simple and dirt cheap, Motorola was famously bungling at fabbing their own 68000-series chips.
For what it's worth, Apple has been doing that for ages. Back in 2007/2008 nobody could get their hands on a capacitive touch screens at any meaningful scale. Apple had bought the entire world's manufacturing capacity and 100% of the supply for about two years ahead. They showed with iPhone that it was possible to do multi-touch screens well - and the consumers took notice. "Pinch to zoom" was a product differentiator back then.
What the consumers couldn't know was that nobody else could possibly match Apple's offering even with the best engineering workforce on the planet, because it was impossible to get hardware capable of multi-touch beyond tiny lab batch sizes. And you had to fight even for those.[ß]
ß: I had the privilege of working directly for a Nokia fellow from 2007 until 2011, and got a ring-side view into the supply chain problems for high-end mobile devices. I also learned to dislike NXP with a passion, because that company has a funny habit of withholding spec sheets unless you are buying their SoC systems by the millions...
Yeah. That device came with a stylus for a good reason.
I think my main contribution to the N900 software stack was a bug report I dealt with during N800/N810 development cycle. I dove deep into the stack to understand and explain exactly why a certain annoying usability snag (dreadful UI latency in media player) was not possible to fix without ripping up larger parts of the UI toolkit layer. After my dissection the bug was eventually marked as WONTFIX, with a remarkable note: "we do not dare fix this bug".
For N900 that part of the toolkit was rewritten. As a result the latency bug was finally possible to tackle, and the large arrows in N900 media player were actually pretty responsive. My guess is that whoever in their UI team had had the bright idea to specify which exact GTK widgets were to be used for the navigation buttons was either told off or removed from their effective decision chain.
And I actually used N900 for some time as my mobile media terminal. It worked really well. (Coworker got its GPS chip working reliably without a SIM card, but that feature was never released. To the very end, GPS state machine in N900 required AGPS to expose its position, even if the chip itself had managed to get an accurate fix on your location.)
Even if NXP allows you to look at datasheets, the only supported way to read them (on Linux) is an ancient, pirated version of acrobat downloaded from a sketchy Chinese site.
I presume Apple invests in a lot of the capital costs? Apple needs to put it's cash somewhere and they can align that with exclusive contractual access to production of leading edge CPUs.
Note that I haven't actually read anything about Apple's investment - I'm just hypothetically assuming it. We do sometimes hear about the exclusive contracts with TSMC.
Fabs got too expensive: that was why Global Foundries was spun out of AMD. Intel now has similar problems as AMD did?